Pr0n rather, Porn used to be pictures and movies of people notionally better-looking than you, letting you watch them do things that you'd rather be doing than whatever it is you're doing at the moment, for a small fee. Now it is mostly people who look just like you, doing those same things, for free. Fundamentalists don't like it because it makes their pants fit funny and makes them forget that they're nasty, rotten, pathetic little slime that deserve nothing better than to be tied up and forced to lick God's boots. In a men's room. Naked.

Evidence suggests that both the far left and the far right hate porn (despite the little-known fact that the far-right consume surprising amounts of porn in secret; after all, Nazis love their discipline). Which in turn means porn is exclusively for the fence-sitters[1]face-sitters[2] moderates.

Rule 34

Of course, porn is not limited to people who look just like you, doing those same things, for free. According to Rule 34, for anything that exists, porn of that thing also exists.[4] This is most commonly seen in the hilarious titles that are available for (ahem) consumption. Although these are usually just mainstream porn with funny themes and titles so aren't really Rule 34 in action, they are pretty damn funny. Examples include:

Strictly, Rule 34 is about the explicit content rather than the superficial differences - and there are no exceptions to Rule 34. Imagine the possibilities: if your sexual fantasy involves ketchup, mailboxes, potato chips, barnyard animals, plaster casts, bananas, and floppy discs all at the same time, you will find pr0n involving all those things if you but look on the Internet, a good place to start would be either Encyclopedia Dramatica or the restricted "adult content" section of DeviantART. There are no exceptions. Have fun you perv!

Not to be confused with

Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #34: War is good for business.

Gibbs' Rule #34 (from NCIS, yet to be revealed)

Addiction

Non- violent porn is generally harmless and can easily be incorporated into healthy sexual and romantic relationships provided both parties like it.

However, as with anything, some people feel that porn has taken over too much of their lives and believe the best thing for them is to cut back on consumption. And, as with any other real or supposed addiction, programs pop up to "cure" your addiction.[7]RationalWiki has not researched the effectiveness of these programs but there is no lack of people willing to pay. [8][9]

Do Mormons and right wingers really hate porn as much as they claim?

In October, 2000, a video-store chain owner named Larry W. Peterman[10] was on trial in Provo, Utah -- home of Brigham Young University -- for selling hardcore videos. The prosecution used the community standards argument against Mr. Peterman, which turned out to be the trial's undoing. Peterman's lawyer, Randy Spencer, noticed that local Marriott[11] hotel sat across the street from the courthouse. He sent an assistant to the hotel to find out which pornos were available on its pay-per-view system. He then sent the assistant to the local cable and satellite companies to gather statistics on how many people in the Provo area viewed porn on pay-per-view.

Guess what? The God-fearing locals, who claimed live in the most conservative county in the United States, absolutely love to watch other people screw. In fact, their viewership was disproportionately large compared to the rest of the country. Based on this information, Mr. Peterman was found not guilty.[12]

In the Winter, 2009 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives,[13] Harvard Business School associate professor Benjamin Edelman surveyed credit card records of Internet porn sites. He found that Utah had the nation's highest percentage of porn site subscribers in all four of the categories that he studied: by population (1.69 per 1000 residents), per number of Internet users (2.49 per 1000 users), per broadband Internet connections (5.47 subscribers per 1000 connections) and number of users relative to subscription rates predicted based on demographics[14] (1.89 per thousand users). In the category regarding percentage of broadband subscribers (the one that got the most attention) the top ten states were as follows:

In fairness, the data gathered technically only indicates an increased tendency to pay for porn, not necessarily to consume it - thus it may well indicate that Utah residents do not consume more porn per capita than the rest of the country, only that a greater proportion of them than average are stupid enough to subscribe to porn paysites, rather than just making use of the Internet's ever growing reserves of free porn, which already are large and diverse enough to cater for just about any preference or kink.

Pr0n enters teh 21st century

On 21 May 2010, a technological quantum leap in the production of porn was announced -- 3D![16][17] Look for a run on new 3D televisions and computer monitors.

Pornography and feminism

Pornography was a primary catalyst for a massive schism in the feminist movement in the 1970s and 1980s, called the Feminist Sex Wars, that was later determined to have ended second-wave feminism and launched the third wave.

One side, the "old guard" of feminism, took the sex-negative position, holding that sex in general, and pornography in particular, "objectifies" women, turning their bodies into vessels for male domination, rape, and capitalist exploitation.[18] The most extreme or doctrinaire position in this camp was perhaps that of Andrea Dworkin, who held that "violation is a synonym for intercourse."

The other side are the sex-positive feminists, who are mostly younger and more liberal than left-wing. They are also called "fun-feminists," presumably because they believe that their opponents do not know the meaning of that adjective. Sex-positive feminists hold that "sexism, not sex, degrades women,"[19] that the stifling of sex is the fault of the "Patriarchy," and that women can use sex as a tool to liberate themselves (some use the portmanteau "sexpression" to describe this process). They also believe that women should be allowed to decide for themselves what does and does not degrade them. One well-known sex-positive feminist is Betty Dodson, a sex educator who would be the last person brought in to teach the abstinence-only curriculum.

This divide within the feminist community succeeded in making a mark on the real world, mainly due to the attempts of the sex-negative camp to institute censorship of dissent pornography. A favorite tactic of this lot was to cite rape statistics, then claim a correlation between these statistics and the viewing of pornography, conveniently not mentioning that said correlation was based on their own dogma rather than any credible research.[19] This gave them a fig-leaf for accusing anyone opposing their position of being an "apologist for rape," or something similar.

Dworkin, along with her fellow radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon, began to push for an "Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance" that would allow anybody to make class-action lawsuits "on behalf of all women" against any publisher who dealt in "media in which women are subordinated in a sexually explicit fashion, by pictures and/or words." The only reason anyone else noticed this was that right-wingers were slobbering at the mouth at the thought of using this to get around that pesky First Amendment. Their ordinance was written into law in Indianapolis, but was quickly found unconstitutional.

After the Meese Commission, instituted by Ronald Reagan for the express purpose of finding that pornography was nasty and harmful and exploitative and whatever else could be thrown at it, disregarded this mandate and delivered a tepid (if at times hilarious) report stating that arguments against pornography would have to be philosophical rather than empirical,[20] this controversy slowly drained away. As third-wave and sex-positive feminism grew in popularity through the next decade, the body of feminists opposing it grew smaller and crankier, although sex-negative feminists still wield some influence in the ivory tower.

↑ Bad jokes considered and rejected for this entry include: "Pr0n enters teh twenty-fist century"; "a gloryholeious advance in porn was announced"; and "This will probably add another dimension to the term 'It's cumming coming right at us!' "